A Turner Broadcasting Systems exec complained last year that using a PVR is the same as stealing. Hollywood has subsequently waged war on them, going so far as to convince federal judges to order ReplayTV founder SonicBlue to spy on ReplyTV users in an effort to determine if users were skipping commercials.
Now I read that the new owners of the ReplayTV are removing the features that separated it from the Tivo: the abilities to remove commercials and to share programming over the Internet. What you have now is a dumbed-down Tivo wannabe.
Hollywood must evolve or die. If its business model depends on advertising, and the market no longer responds to advertising, tough beans! Guess its time to get a new business model! Strong-arming the electronics industry (a much larger industry, dollar-wise but with not nearly the lobbying clout) is not the way to do it. Convincing the courts to block PVRs is not the way to do it. Accusing your customers – the viewing public – of being crooks is not the way to do it.
I am so tired of the media mafia in this country. If I had a million dollars, I’d launch some initiatives to forever keep Hollywood’s hands off the rights of citizens to decide what media they absorb. The lengths that Hollywood is going in order to maintain their control over viewers is truly frightening.
I support the efforts to build open-source, freely-available PVRs. Not every program is the product of Hollywood. I’d like to see people everywhere producing their own TV shows and sharing them through the Internet or satellite feeds. I’d love to see a new television network, born of PVRs, sprout up across the world, driving a stake into the heart of the idea of rigid, centralized control.
It can be done. The technology is there. And such an idea is guaranteed to produce content far more interesting than what comes out of the brain[dead]-trusts in Hollywood studio boardrooms.
Hollywood should fear the PVR. The PVR, along with the Internet, is destined to relegate Hollywood to the scrap heap of entertainment history.